immanence

Tim Morton has penned a nice (if thoroughly Mortonish) introduction to a very nice introduction (by Steven Shaviro) to speculative realism.

With lines like these:

“Theory class, in other words, needs an upgrade. Theory class is pretty obviously quite narrow in any case. “Theory” is basically (mostly continental) philosophy or derivatives of philosophy that some (mostly literature) scholar thought was cool sometime between 1968 and now. It’s a record store full of compilations, run by a confusing array of managers who mostly only read emails from other managers about what music is hot at a given moment. Both those facts explain why speculative realism didn’t start in an English department and why Alfred North Whitehead is not on the theory radar at all. With the entire universe as his subject matter, Whitehead is definitely not in the record store.

“Enter Steven Shaviro, who is both an English professor and a Whiteheadian, and the scintillating The Universe of Things, whose title is an allusion to a poem by Shelley.”

And thanks to Shaviro’s presentation of it, Tim (bless his heart) shows that he’s warming to Whiteheadian speculative realism.

For the record, I define speculative realism this way:

Realism is the belief in a reality that trumps and outwits all our ideas about it; and speculative realism is the willingness, and even eagerness, to wonder (and wander) about that reality in novel, surprising, informed, and challenging directions.

That’s why I like to take my ecology with a dose of astrobiological sci-fi. (And with Shelley, among others.)